How can unified communications tools benefit your business? Explore these four use cases of unified communications to make the right purchase decision for your needs.

A range of communications services fall under the umbrella of unified communications. Yet implementations of unified communications (UC) tools can vary greatly from one organization to the next. Thus, choosing the right UC platform for your needs can be a challenge.

Before picking a platform, the need for UC must be apparent. Traditionally speaking, most businesses consider the telephone to be the most important communications tool a business can provide. However, you'll likely find an increasing number of situations where other forms of communication would be more efficient, easier to manage or could create a better overall user experience. This is especially true considering recent trends toward mobile and remote workforces. In many situations, telephone calls are no longer the best option. That's where more modern UC tools such as video conferencing, team chat, file sharing and web conferencing come into play from a user productivity perspective.

Unified communications benefits existing processes

To properly understand how UC can benefit an organization, the decision-making mindset must go beyond traditional phone calls to the broader spectrum of business communications. Unified communications implementation benefits, or blunders, become clear when assessing how well employees are using all these communication applications. Thus, companies should take care to ensure their employees have the right UC tools.

UC becomes a strategic decision because it can address communications issues in new ways, by delivering an integrated platform where all these applications are in use in a common -- or unified -- environment. UC allows companies to use communications tools concurrently and interchangeably, creating multichannel sessions so employees can collaborate more effectively. Furthermore, UC delivers a consistent user experience, meaning employees can work the same way regardless of the endpoint, operating system, location or network used to access the platform. If business leadership believes its current approach to managing communications is limiting both individual and operational performance, then it needs UC. Modern UC tools provide a richer communications experience.

Since UC is a service-centric tool, conventional ROI metrics, Capex and Opex are not appropriate for supporting a buying decision. This is especially true in the case of unified communications as a service. Metrics do exist to monitor productivity -- and this is standard for contact centers -- but they are not widely used in the workplace, and this has always been a challenge for UC. Vendors do offer versions of these metrics, but they can be difficult to compare accurately, so businesses need to look beyond the numbers for decision-making criteria. To support that strategy, here are four use cases where UC provides clear benefits and improvements over current practices.

#1: Employee productivity

This is where UC has the greatest impact, since all employees use communications applications. For internal communication, presence is the key catalyst, since it allows employees to see the status of co-workers in real time. Status can include information such as their location, whether they're on a call and whether or not they're able to communicate at any given time. Not only does this technology cut down on wasted time, but by knowing which modes and team members are available, employees can choose the best form of communication for the task at hand.

Unified communications benefits employees by empowering them to work effectively from the corporate office or a remote location, which is a key driver for personal productivity in the mobile and remote workforce we now operate in. For most employees, the desk is just one of many locations where work gets done, and UC is built around where the end user is, rather than where the desk phone is.

#2: Team-based productivity

Outside solo work, employees also work in teams, and in these settings, the need for effective communication is even more important. With today's geographically dispersed workforces and decentralized operations, teams rarely meet in person all at once. This is where communications technology plays a major role, and businesses spend a lot of money on various conferencing services. The ROI is often disappointing because of the high cost and poor user experience. Team chat and file sharing applications enable employees to communicate effectively between teams that operate in different locations and time zones.

Another way unified communications benefits businesses is the consistent cross-platform end-user experience, where everyone is using the same applications on their desktops, laptops and mobile devices; it allows users to easily collaborate in real time wherever they are. Again, companies can add other users to conversations when necessary. Higher-end UC services will have a strong video component -- including high-definition video conferencing -- and this can help reduce the need for travel to attend a meeting in person.

Another key benefit is the persistent nature of UC -- it's always available, so ad hoc meetings are never a problem. Conventional conferencing systems are reservation-based and not always ideal or available for informal collaboration -- a mode that many employees prefer given their busy schedules.

#3: Organizational agility

When both employees and teams are more productive, the organization will be as well. Organizational agility reflects the strategic value of UC, as the results have an additive impact on the business as a whole. To recognize how unified communications benefits business, however, the organization must view UC through the eyes of management, not just the IT staff. For management, communications may only have a utilitarian value, but when shown to drive productivity, streamline processes and better business outcomes, the UC value proposition will resonate.

Businesses need agility in all areas to be competitive, and management will support initiatives that deliver on this strategy. This includes the ability to communicate agilely. While the use case is strong, there really aren't metrics to make a numbers-driven decision, so the rationale needs to be built around the assurance that UC can perform as advertised.

#4: IT operations

The responsibility will fall on IT to deploy and effectively manage a UC platform across the organization. However, unified communications benefits IT staff by deploying applications in a common environment. IT teams achieve deployment either through on-premises appliances, virtual machines or managed services within a public cloud. The ability to properly manage a range of communications applications is ideal -- especially when they eliminate the need for employees to seek communications tools outside the control of IT.

For example, BYOD policies and shadow IT present ongoing challenges for IT, as control over network resources keeps slipping into the hands of end users. IT would welcome anything to level the playing field, and with network communications management, UC is an improvement over allowing anyone to randomly choose communications tools that open the entire organization up to malware threats and data loss.

Picking a UC provider is an important strategic decision for the entire organization. Yet it's clear that a platform cannot be justified on numbers alone. UC's value should be reflected in improved employee performance and efficiencies. For businesses that see a direct connection between communication and workflow outcomes, these use cases provide a solid foundation for making a decision that will serve management and IT equally well.

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Since I frequently communicate with clients and collaborators in other locations, my primary interest in unified communication is to improve interaction during meetings and reduce the friction caused by geographical distance. I appreciate that this article discussed the not so obvious benefits to individual productivity through something as simple as a status message.

Increased spending on UC infrastructure has allowed us to make significant cost reductions in travel and expenses related to conducting business in our other office locations, both domestic and international.